Tribute to James Cornford

13 October 2011

James Cornford, co-founder of the
Constitution Unit and chair of its Advisory Committee, died on 26
September. James had a longstanding
interest in constitutional reform, first awakened when he was a young Professor
at Edinburgh,
and later developed when he was director of the Outer Circle Policy Unit in the
late 1970s. OCPU did pioneering work on
devolution and drafting a freedom of information bill, and James later became
chair of the Campaign for Freedom of Information. He was the founder and first director of the
Institute for Public Policy Research, and while there assembled a team of
lawyers to draft a written constitution, published with a detailed commentary
as A Written Constitution for the UK (IPPR, 1991).

At that time John Smith as Labour leader
was developing Labour's plans for a major programme of constitutional
reform. James was concerned that in
government Labour might fail as spectacularly as they had over reform of the House
of Lords in 1968, and devolution in the 1970s. So he persuaded me to leave the Nuffield Foundation and start a project
producing detailed plans for the implementation of all Labour's and the Liberal
Democrats' constitutional reform proposals: devolution in Scotland and Wales,
Human Rights legislation, reform of the House of Lords, freedom of information,
referendums, regional government in England. We recruited a team of three others, two coming direct from Whitehall; and in its
first 18 months the Constitution Unit produced detailed reports on all these
topics, with James reading and commenting on them all.

He was a delightful chair of the Unit's
Advisory Committee, teasing and charming in equal measure formidable public
servants like Sir Kerr Fraser and Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, politicians like Tony
Wright, and journalists like Andrew Marr. He was full of fun and mischief, but underlying that was a real
seriousness of purpose, and a capacity to puncture any kind of humbug or sloppy
thinking.